For a little less than a year I’ve been needing to buy a new mattress. Mine is old, it doesn’t support my back, and for the past month has been the cause of much severe back pain. Since the holidays are upon us, I’ve decided to ask my family to chip in toward getting a new mattress, which is going to cost somewhere in the realm of $500 even though it is only a full size bed. Bah.
My dilemma is this: I want to give them an easy way to send me money electronically. PayPal is out because they take a portion of the money in fees. I’m willing to pay some fees, but they take too much. I was thinking of some system like Kickstarter, where it keeps track of how much has been raised so far. But I feel like that is for actual projects, not just a personal “I want this thing.” Given that Mary had such a terrible time with Fundable.com, I’m a little afraid to try another similar site without knowing anything about them.
Does anyone out there know of a site where people can send money and see how close the fund is to the final goal and etc? I’m looking at ChipIn.com right now but, again, I know nothing about them and I am wary.
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Unfortunately I have a business account, so it charges everything like a sale. And even if I didn’t, none of my family has PayPal. They’d have to do a credit card charge, anyway :(
Afaik paypal changed their policies and no longer charge fees for simple transfers even between Premier accounts (they only charge fees for sales). This might change w/large amounts of money though? My only experience is with moving amounts of less than $100 around.
I was going to say the same thing. Paypal doesn’t charge domestically as long as it’s a personal account and not biz account.
Paypal doesn’t use fees if it’s sent from a personal account to a personal account and you fund it with a bank transfer or a paypal balance.
I was going to say if you had a store in mind, if they sell gift cards, then people could just send you those.
If you know where you want to buy it from and it happens to be Sears or eBay, both have group gifting functionality. (And Best Buy, I think, but I doubt they have mattresses.)
Then there’s these, but I haven’t tried them and can’t vouch:
http://thebiggift.net/
http://www.edivvy.com/
http://www.socialwise.com/socialwise-group-gifting.html
http://fromeveryone.com/
If you’re concerned about Paypal’s fees, don’t use Kickstarter. Paypal only takes $0.30 + 2.99% per transaction. Between Amazon Payments fee and Kickstarter’s own cut, you lose around 10%.